ars with the rivals of Rome, leaving home and
family for their campaigns and returning to them in the winter. With a
hardness and closeness inconsistent with--indeed, opposed to--the
charitable spirit, they combined the strength of character and sense
of justice without which charity becomes sentimental and unsocial. In
the development of the family, and thus, indirectly, in the
development of charity, they stand for settled obligation and
unrelenting duty.

Under the protection of the head of the family "in dependent freedom"
lived the clients. They were in a middle position between the freemen
and the slaves. The relation between patron and client lasted for
several generations; and there were many clients. Their number increased
as state after state was conquered, and they formed the _plebs_, in Rome
the _plebs urbana_, the lower orders of the city.

In relation to our subject the important factors are the family, the
_plebs_ and slavery.

Two processes were at work from an early date, before the first agrarian
law (486 B.C.): the impoverishment of the _plebs_ and the increase of
slavery. The former led to the _annona civica_, or the free supply of
corn to the citizens, and to the _sportula_ or the organized food-supply
for poor clients, and ultimately to the _alimentarii pueri_, the
maintenance of children of citizens by voluntary and imperial bounty.
The latter (slavery) was the standing witness that, as self-support was
undermined, the task of relief became hopeless, and the impoverished
citizen, as the generations passed, became in turn dependant, beggar,
pauper and slave.

The great patrician families--"an oligarchy of warriors and
slaveholders"--did not themselves engage in trade, but, entering on
large speculations, employed as their agents their clients, _libertini_
or freedmen, and, later, their slaves. The constant wars, for which the
soldiers of a local militia were eventually retained in permanent
service, broke up the yeomanry and very greatly reduced their number.
Whole families of citizens became impoverished, and their lands were in
consequence sold to the large patrician families, members of which had
acquired lucrative posts, or prospered in their speculations, and
assumed possession of the larger part of the land, the _ager publicus_,
acquired by the state through conquest. The city had always been the
centre of the patrician families, the patron of the trading _libertini_
and ot